


primavera

by tothemoon



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Argentina, Friends to Lovers, Long-Distance Friendship, M/M, Moderate Longing, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, Tokyo (City), Travel, Wine, chapter 372 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23864761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tothemoon/pseuds/tothemoon
Summary: They say it takes twenty-six years, for certain breeds to fully bloom.
Relationships: (the latter is very slight though), Hanamaki Takahiro/Matsukawa Issei, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 45
Kudos: 434





	primavera

**Author's Note:**

> Big, big thank you to @nachuuki_ for beta-ing my first iwaoi in four years, and @lightveils for suggesting long distance iwaoi one day in my mentions (i will forever cry). This was going to start as a simple meditation on houseplants but then longing got the best of me.
> 
> Recommended listening for this: Tú by maye.

The haworthia is a perennial succulent, most known for its spiky leaves, its ornamental purposes, and the occasional ability to bloom.

“It doesn't need a lot of water,” Hanamaki explains over coffee, a week before Oikawa’s twenty-sixth birthday. “Just give it an espresso cup's worth once a month, and it'll do just fine. It doesn't even care about the sun.”

Oikawa holds the terra cotta pot like it's a mug of tea that's not quite cool enough to make full contact. Of all the gifts he's received, early birthday, housewarming, or otherwise, a succulent is not something he’s come to expect. It looks fake, judging from its waxy, pointed leaves, as if Hanamaki expects him to kill anything that might have a chance of living. Oikawa, in turn, tests this: he takes his actual espresso cup, still filled halfway with the lukewarm, high octane stuff, and holds it over the plant, like a madman threatening a child hostage.

Hanamaki doesn't budge. He blinks once, then twice, and takes a sip from his own latte. “Now, that's not very nice. Matsukawa and I put a lot of effort into naming Iwa-kun.”

A little bit of espresso does dribble onto the plant, apparently named Iwa-kun.

“You named it after...”

“Yes,” Hanamaki answers. “I mean, look at it. It looks just like him.”

“It does not.”

Leaning forward over the table, Hanamaki ushers Oikawa closer to him. “Listen,” he says, like the start of a secret. “If Iwaizumi were to get reincarnated tomorrow, and god needed some last minute living creature to connect his soul to, wouldn't that be the first thing you think of?”

Oikawa takes a napkin and cleans the coffee off Iwa-kun. “I don't know. Is the reincarnation his punishment for a bad life lived? Or a reward for something good?”

Hanamaki ponders this for a moment.

“A reward,” he decides. “A life of blissful non-sentience. What's better than that?”

The plant in Oikawa’s care looks too small and too new, as if beings like this have no chance of carrying old souls. He flicks one of the leaves, letting it prick him. “Then it can’t be Iwa-chan,” he counters, “because he's done nothing but bad in this lifetime.”

“Oh?” Hanamaki says, as his grin, behind the paper cup, stretches into cleverness. “What happened? Another fight?”

“Oh, nothing.” Oikawa huffs out the word, nothing, and gets up from the table. He thinks about leaving Iwa-kun there, in the off-chance it _is_ Iwaizumi’s soul caught between the leaves, but he takes one look at its stupid baby head and thinks, _well, he’s not so bad after all_. “Thanks for this,” he says begrudgingly, which leads Hanamaki to applaud, and soon the whole café has to see Oikawa Tooru carry Iwa-kun, with great gingerness, towards the door.

“Remember!” Hanamaki calls after him. “Try not to fuss over it too much! It'll only kill the poor guy!”

Oikawa waves him off and stands outside with his new friend. Or enemy, he's not sure. Under the middling rain, one just heavy enough to require his umbrella, he raises Iwa-kun towards the sky before pulling him back under the vinyl.

“You won’t die on me, will you?” Oikawa asks.

Later, when he's back at home, he reads about the Iwa-kun’s hardy nature on a gardening forum: that the haworthia, resilient to most beginners’ brown thumbs, will stay firmly in place, hardly ever to grow, or change shape.

* * *

Iwaizumi lives seven buildings over from Oikawa, in a modest studio apartment a few minutes’ walking distance to the Shimokitazawa station. Oikawa, in truth, has never liked anything about the abode: it's cramped, and housed in a boring, tan block of concrete that has the nerve to call itself something as nice as the PRIMAVERA, complete in English and all-caps. For all intents and purposes, they both know it's a starter apartment, but Iwaizumi loves it, or at least tolerates it, because the rent is cheap and he can walk to the station at any moments’ notice.

Three days after they’ve last spoken, and a few hours after receiving Iwa-kun, Oikawa shows up to Iwaizumi’s front door with the plant still intact.

“It smells like onions in here,” Oikawa says first.

“Give me a break.” Iwaizumi doesn't even acknowledge Iwa-kun. “I'm making the butadon you asked for, aren't I?”

Oikawa takes the butadon as a peace offering, while Iwaizumi makes his way back into his kitchen to tend to his ingredients. In truth, the exact cause of their fight is already a far-off memory to Oikawa, because there have been many over the years, and even more of littler substance; but he knows the hurdle of that small quiet that comes after, like a puddle that one must jump over to get to the other side of the sidewalk.

No one apologizes for fights forgotten. Instead, Oikawa takes off his wet trainers, then places them right next to the ugliest running shoes he's ever seen in his life. They’re very Iwaizumi shoes: always ASICS, always bought because they were on sale, always scuffed. This reminds Oikawa, briefly, of how his mother used to arrange their shoes, side by side, in the foyer, and how he'd also laughed at them on their way out.

“Hey,” Iwaizumi says. “Did you hear what I just said?”

“Huh?” Oikawa asks, dreams of footwear shattered.

“What’s up with the plant?”

“Oh, right.” Oikawa sweeps into the kitchen, where he presents Iwa-kun in the palm of his hands. “It was a birthday present. From Makki and Mattsun.”

“I forgot about _him_ ,” Iwaizumi says; the pinch in his voice makes it sound as if he's encountered his greatest enemy. “Matsukawa told me what they were planning.”

“And you'd forgotten their grand plans?”

Iwaizumi shrugs, before turning back to the skillet and separating his cooking into two bowled portions. “It's always some kind of nonsense, the two of them. Besides, you know how things get. I have to start packing next week. No time to remember.”

He sets two bowls of butadon down on the coffee table, but Oikawa finds no will to eat. They smack their hands together, to give thanks for their weekly dinner together, and let the silence garnish itself in the sound of a city’s downpour.

“Say, Iwa-chan.”

“Hm?” Iwaizumi hums, almost coos, though he must be starving by now; lately his hunger, never angry, comes off like a sleeping dog in summer.

Oikawa wants to make a comment about the passage of time, that Iwaizumi is practically an old man, because he doesn't know anyone else that says, _no time to remember._ But in that moment, Oikawa notices several things at once: just how well-cooked this butadon is, and how time furnishes starter apartments into lived-in apartments with coffee tables, framed posters, and matching dish ware. How time makes those same ugly trainers, always scuffed, always bought on sale, always ASICS, Mizunos now.

How time, a month, to be exact, will shove all these things into moving boxes and suitcases, for a graduate school somewhere in southern California.

“What’s wrong?” Iwaizumi asks.

Oikawa looks down at his untouched food, then Iwaizumi, then the haworthia. “Nothing, really,” he says. “Just thinking about something Makki said before.”

“And that was?”

“He said that if you needed a vessel to reincarnate into, that this plant would be the place to do it. Because, I don't know, I guess it looks like you.” Oikawa takes Iwa-kun into his hands, then spins it gently with the single rotation of his wrist. “And I said to him, well if Iwa-chan were to end up this way, do you think it’d be for a life well-lived, or bad?”

“I'm not dying, Oikawa.”

“Just entertain me for a moment.”

Butadon first, Iwaizumi takes a bit of pork and onion into his mouth before answering. He swallows, but doesn't pick off the grains of rice stuck to the side of his cheek. Then comes the sigh, the little kind, halfway to exasperation, but patient in restraint.

“Well, I know that stuff isn't up to me,” Iwaizumi says, “but I think I’d know what to tell whoever’s deciding.”

The rain, falling ever-harder, hits against the window and seeps through the ceiling of a top floor studio. Its pitter-patter, a beat from the cosmos, becomes a metronome for the passing seconds. But Iwaizumi, unbothered by time or hunger or leaky roofs, levels his gaze up from his bowl, only for Oikawa to find.

Iwaizumi continues, in near-silence: “I’d say, well, I think I’ve done pretty good in this life.”

* * *

When Iwaizumi Hajime arrives in San Juan one spring in November, the first thing he hands Oikawa is not a hello, but an ancient jockstrap once autographed by Argentinian setter, Jose Blanco. Iwaizumi’s gesture, unwarranted, makes Oikawa misty-eyed, not because he’d missed Iwaizumi, but because he’d once loved that jockstrap like an ancient family heirloom.

“You look like you're going to cry,” Iwaizumi says.

“I might if my mom ever puts it through the wash again.”

Iwaizumi grins, barely there but true in the act. Oikawa’s laughter echoes across the bus stop, and he knows it's too loud to sound completely natural. At twenty-three, he knows that nothing ever has to be forced with the likes of Iwaizumi; that even with the change of season, and hemisphere, and country, they will always remain as they are. But he knows what goes on, in the world where the ball is no longer in play. That past Argentina, in Tokyo, his friends are recent college graduates, with apartments, and new jobs, and maybe-girlfriends; that even Iwaizumi, who’s always stood at 179 centimeters for as long as he can remember, seems taller, and broader in the shoulders.

“So, how’s Ayaka-chan?” Oikawa asks Iwaizumi, en route to his apartment to drop off luggage. When he stands next to him, he lets himself hover closer, if only to compare the difference of height in their shoulders.

Iwaizumi darkens. “Why are we bringing her up, all of a sudden?”

“My, my,” Oikawa teases, while the air, even bathed in unseasonable humidity, feels easy enough to inhale. “Did you guys break up?”

“I don't know. I guess.”

“You _guess_?”

“It wasn't a big deal or anything,” Iwaizumi says, looking down at the ground. “One day, you just sit in the park and think, maybe we’re not right for each other after all. That's all there is to it.”

“How unromantic of you. Is she back at home, wondering where you've been?”

“No, we don't talk.”

“Not even an Instagram follow?” Oikawa asks.

“You know you’ll never tempt me into getting one of those.”

Iwaizumi rubs the back of his neck and keeps it there as if he's encountered a sudden heat rash. He looks away for a moment, at the passing cars, the clouded sky, and holds out his open palm at the sight of the oncoming grey on the horizon.

“Rain,” he continues on, pausing in his steps. “Do you feel that?”

Oikawa might've seen something about intermittent showers on the news that morning, between spotty sun and high humidity, but he can never be sure — “It’s nothing,” he says, as if things like this are up to him.

But strolling turns to pacing, faster on the sidewalk, for reasons Oikawa cannot muster. It starts in his feet, then beats in his chest and against his temple. It starts with Iwaizumi, who’s actually here in Argentina, who’s always loved the trees and mountain climbing and good weather, and who should _have_ good weather on his first trip abroad and perfect days, so Oikawa can gloat about it later.

His feet pick up into a dash. The sky opens. Iwaizumi keeps up, right next to him.

“It's all right,” Iwaizumi tells him, as drizzle turns to a full on downpour. “No need to rush.”

Oikawa notices the light grip over his wrist, the fingers barely clasped. Iwaizumi lets go soon after, as if not to hold him for too long, and Oikawa, dazed by the change in the weather, can only linger in his traces.

* * *

By the time Iwaizumi Hajime is twenty-five, his new Instagram account emerges as one of Tokyo’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

The enigma begins simply with its creation — no profile picture, or bio, or photos of people. The only reason Oikawa even knows it's Iwaizumi’s account is because of the username, IH1994610, and all the other people he’s followed like Matsuun, Makki, Seijou alumni, and a few cousins, whom Oikawa’s met over the years. Moreover, Iwaizumi doesn't even acknowledge making the Instagram, it’s just there, hanging over Oikawa’s head, to which he just begins to wonder why in the heavens he's made this account to begin with.

“Are we seeing the rise of influencer Iwaizumi Hajime?” Matsukawa finally asks, when they all go to dinner one day, to celebrate Oikawa’s valiant return to Japan via the V-League. He scrolls to Iwaizumi’s first post: an unedited picture of a tree branch, fingers under an unfurled leaf.

“No,” Iwaizumi answers, finally breaking the ice on all things Instagram. “It's just an old picture I had.”

“Feeling sentimental?” Oikawa asks, diverting his attention to a giant bowl of curry udon. “Are you dying?”

Hanamaki and Matsukawa look at each other, before Iwaizumi sighs. He sets down his chopsticks and takes a swig of tea like it’s liquor, tough in going down.

“I've been meaning to tell you, Oikawa.”

“What?”

“Well, I’ve applied to some graduate schools in California.”

Oikawa blinks once, then twice. He pretends no appetites were harmed in the making of this revelation, and forces himself to take another bite.

“Well, good for you, Iwa-chan. I've heard wonders about their glorious sun.”

Later, when he’s scrolling Iwaizumi’s account in private for the umpteenth time, Oikawa decides that the account is wholly unremarkable, and one ill-suited for the likes of Instagram — that in a place so inherently dishonest, Iwaizumi just has to be the one who tears down all pretense. It makes Oikawa want to laugh, so he does: at a caught fish, the half-eaten hamburgers, the hyper-focused pictures of giant stag beetles fighting, caught in the act.

Oikawa laughs until he wants to cry, and soon he finds that he's putting on his shoes and locking up the door to his apartment (which he has still yet to furnish, or really unpack, for that matter). And even though he usually prefers morning runs, he’s now jogging in the night, and he’s suddenly hungry, even though he's just eaten udon with his friends. _Ah, here it comes again._ Oikawa knows that the feeling has always been there, like someone trapped in the house of his body, always in the state of unrest. He can tell how lonely it is, by the way it peers up his throat, making him gag, or when his eyes suddenly tear up and he knows it’s there, opening a window and watching somewhere inside him. That strange welling, he thinks. One he’d carried to Argentina and back. One he can usually run off, until he can't.

“Oikawa?” an all-too-familiar voice asks. “Is that you down there?”

Funny, how steps lead to the PRIMAVERA. Oikawa thinks about running back the same way he came, as one should do if they've come somewhere unannounced.

Oikawa smacks his face and pretends he’s worked up a sweat. “Ah, no.” He guesses he’ll stay.

“No?” Iwaizumi asks, sipping at what looks like a beer.

“Fine. Yes.”

“What are you doing at this hour? It’s almost ten.”

“Well, I just happened to be running and...” Oikawa swallows, letting his usual feints disappear back down his throat. “And well — I was thinking,” he wants to say, of his pictures, and how all of them are too mundane and in need of a few filters, how, weirdly, he's offended he wasn't there to be there for the fish picture, or the one with the hamburgers.

“I was thinking that dinner wasn't enough,” Oikawa tells him instead, though he isn't feeling particularly hungry.

“What?”

“I'm starving.”

“You are, huh?”

“Can we have dinner, Iwa-chan?”

After a few seconds of silence, Oikawa expects the usual answers from Iwaizumi, like _go home Oikawa,_ or _you just ate Oikawa_ or _there’s a convenience store up the street Oikawa;_ but Iwaizumi merely sips at his beer and sets it down on the ledge.

“I might only have enough stuff for butadon,” Iwaizumi tells him instead. “And it probably won't taste good, either.”

The welling returns, never-ending; it feels smaller in Iwaizumi’s presence, a burn into simmering. For once, Oikawa basks in their distance, just three floors up on a low-density residential building, one no longer defined by kilometers, or hemispheres, or double-digit hours.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa calls out. “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

On the street, Oikawa wipes his face against his shirt collar, delirious.

“How did you know it was me, down here?”

Iwaizumi clicks his tongue at first, before peeling himself off the ledge. “Sometimes, when you run,” he says, “you look like you're rushing for the last train.”

Oikawa stifles the laugh, then lets himself have the morsel, when he hears Iwaizumi’s door buzz open to welcome him.

* * *

“Hey, Iwa-chan.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think we can have dinner like this every week?”

Iwaizumi shrugs, before letting the pork burn in the pan.

“Okay,” he says. “But let's order something, next time.”

* * *

The weekend before Oikawa leaves for San Juan, his mother says it's time to repot all the potted plants around the house. “You see,” she says, “some might like staying in their places for many years at a time. But others, you have to give them space to breathe every once in a while.”

Oikawa is eighteen and bored, when he helps his mother gather all the houseplants in their yard. He’s horrified when he counts just how many there are: forty-seven, not counting the ones she’s just ordered from mail-order catalogs and the local garden shop.

“I never realized we lived in a jungle,” he says to her, when she beckons for him to bring over the giant bags of soil.

“You got big and tall from these plants,” his mother insists. “They purify the air, you know? You've been living in a palace, if you think about it.”

“I don't know about that.”

His mother smiles, obstinately bright. Oikawa shudders when she asks him to bring him the one named _monstera deliciosa._

“Which one is that again?” he asks, to which his mother can only click her tongue in disappointment. He picks up a tiny cactus off the ground. “This guy?”

“No, no. The big one, with the split leaves. Heart-shaped, almost.”

Oikawa finds the one she's talking about. At this point, the monstera is probably the house’s biggest plant; even on the ground, it almost reaches his chin, and dares to spread out to his wingspan by the way of wild leaves. His mother claps once, a small prayer for continued growth, then sighs at its majesty.

“Oh, that one is my favorite,” she says. “I've had that one since you were a baby. It was about as big as you were out of the womb back then, and look at it now.”

Pulling at one of the leaves with a pinch, Oikawa decides he's made a new enemy for life.

“Well, I'm still taller,” he teases, just before realizing that his mother is blotting her eyes with the cotton of her t-shirt.

“Okaa-san?”

“You're going to Argentina,” she says, and Oikawa crouches down with her, amongst the other plants. “I looked it up the other day, just so I had a sense of the distance. It's over 18,000 kilometers. Can you believe that?”

“It’ll be alright, okaa-san.” Oikawa swallows; it's not every day his mother cries, and to a child, even at eighteen, it is a terrifying sight. “The team’s setting me up in a nice apartment with a big courtyard, and they’ve got all kinds of trees that you'd only find in fantasy movies. Isn't that nice? I’ll even take pictures for you.”

His mother shakes her head. “I know you'll be okay, Tooru. You always are.” She clears away the last of her tears, straightening up from the sort of tidying-up only mothers know best. “Ah, you know, I guess I’m just worried about this monstera. Getting used to a new pot can take some adjustment, even for the toughest varieties.”

Funny, the language a family speaks. Oikawa says nothing about it and pats his mother on the back.

That afternoon, he learns the merits of shaking out old soil, and how planters partially cracked and outgrown, can make for new homes with others just beginning to grow. He laughs with her, his mother, now empty-nested, and jokes about the times he snuck out to play volleyball, and the day he went with Iwaizumi to get a (clean!) jock strap signed by Jose Blanco.

“Where is Hajime-kun, anyway?” she asks, looking to the door like he might arrive at any moment. “Wasn't he supposed to come over this afternoon?”

Oikawa shrugs. “We fought.”

“That's a shame,” she says. “What did you fight about?”

“Nothing, really,” he says, as he helps to lift the last one, the monstera, out of its old pot. “I've just been reminding him to get an Instagram, you know, so he can always find out what I'm doing in Argentina. It'd be a shame for him to miss out.”

His mother smiles, full of secrets; Oikawa thinks they are the sort that he will understand when he’s older, and hopefully more grown.

“I know my Hajime-kun,” she just says.

“Do you know your _Hajime-kun_?” Oikawa asks, repeating the name in jest; in truth, he relishes any chance to say the name, even as a joke, because he hasn’t called Iwaizumi _Hajime_ since they were children.

“I do. And guess what else I do know?”

“What?” Oikawa asks.

“That he’ll always find you, wherever you are.”

Pressing the monstera into its new planter, Oikawa digs out new soil, lets it trickle over leaves and established roots, and secretly makes amends with his new nemesis.

* * *

Iwaizumi does appear, if not twenty minutes later, with convenience store fare and a volleyball tucked under his left arm. Oikawa grins, and they play like they did as children — hands spread in the air, amongst the things that grow and sprawl.

They say, without saying, never saying: sure, I'll miss you with the best of them, and maybe you are the best, but with what I lose, the world gets.

Oikawa’s mother watches and feels the tears come again. Brushing them off, she goes to rearrange their shoes in the foyer instead.

* * *

“Makki,” Oikawa says over the phone, three days before his twenty-sixth birthday. “I don't know how to tell you this, but I think Iwa-kun is dying.”

Over the line, the silence sits heavy. Hanamaki sighs, always sighs, before saying something snarky to Matsukawa on his end. “There’s no way,” he responds, “because it’s a succulent, and succulents are supposed to be the easiest plants to — ”

“Yes, to care for,” Oikawa interrupts. “But listen. I think the plant experts, whatever they're called — ”

“The horticulturists,” Matsukawa chimes in.

“Yes, the horticulturists,” Oikawa continues on, disregarding the fact that he’s been on speakerphone this whole time. “They've got it all wrong, because how are you supposed to ignore something that looks like a small child?” He glares at Iwa-kun and the few of his leaves that now resemble raisins, shriveled and beyond saving. “He just looks like he wants to be cared for. I can feel it.”

Quiet comes again. “And how much have you watered it already?” Hanamaki asks.

“I don't know, maybe six or seven times?”

“Six or seven times,” Matsukawa repeats. “In three days.”

On their end, the rip of a zipper echoes through the phone, followed by the shuffle of pacing feet and the rolling of a suitcase.

“Now, Oikawa, is this just revenge for us not being here for your birthday?” Hanamaki asks. “You know we can't help it. We’ve both got business in the states.”

“No, no,” Oikawa says. “I get that. Have a merry little trip. The best time! Have fun knowing you've cursed me, bringing Iwa-kun into my life.”

“But what did I tell you before, in the coffee shop?”

“How are you going to expect me to remember that?” Oikawa asks right back. “I've been busy. No time to remember.”

“Come on, now.”

Oikawa picks up Iwa-kun and looks it straight in its imaginary eyes. Another leaf falls off in retaliation. He thinks about watering it again, just to defy the order of all natural things, before placing it on the windowsill, in the indirect sun.

“Just stop fussing over it so much,” Oikawa repeats, “and it'll be alright.”

* * *

Rain persists, committed to the pour, until the fourth day of Iwaizumi’s trip. His time in San Juan had been mired by a series of mishaps, like a weather forecast, wrong in all the worst ways, and a shoddy shower in the apartment, not to mention the jet lag; but when Iwaizumi rises the next morning all the same, hands reaching to draw open shut curtains, Oikawa knows another day has arrived.

“Well? Where are we going today?” Iwaizumi asks, looking over his shoulder, though Oikawa could’ve sworn he was quiet about entering the living room.

“How’d you know I was even there?” Oikawa asks back.

Iwaizumi looks down at Oikawa’s slippers.

“You have the footfalls of a deer stampede.”

Oikawa suggests breakfast at a café with outdoor seating. There, he orders two medialunas to keep things light, along with two of their strongest coffees. When the spread arrives at the table, Oikawa presents one of the pastries with the wave of his hand: “it’s pretty much a croissant, I know, but if you look at it closely, the pointy parts are baked together. It’s never-ending.”

“Never-ending, huh?” Iwaizumi asks, holding his own medialuna in his hands. “How would anyone be able to eat it?”

“What do you mean?” Oikawa asks, genuinely perplexed. “I mean, they _do_ get messy if there's cream in them, but not impossible.”

“No, I mean...” Iwaizumi trails off, taking a giant gulp of coffee instead. “Never mind. It's stupid.”

“What?”

“You called it never-ending,” Iwaizumi says, head still bowed to his cup. “Wouldn't it be bad luck, to eat the eternity you're given?”

Hearing this, Oikawa nearly collapses from the table. He finishes the rest of his coffee instead, already exhilarated enough to do a million push-ups.

“Iwa-chan,” he says, slamming his cup down and covering his face with his palms. “One day, you're going to make someone very happy with your earnest nature.”

Iwaizumi finishes his brew, placing his cup with a gentle tap on the coaster. He sits there for a moment, before shaking out of some unknown haze.

“Sure,” he says. “Maybe one day.”

Oikawa peeks through his fingers. Heartbeat in his hands, he considers running a whole marathon after breakfast.

* * *

For the next two days in San Juan, Oikawa notices the small hums of approval, as if time and distance has whittled Iwaizumi into something gentler. “Hm,” Iwaizumi says, every time Oikawa shows him something new like the wine vineyards in Mendoza, two hours away, or the strange rock formations in Valle de la Luna. The days lull on, longer not by the hours, or the limitless roads; Iwaizumi’s particular quiet stretches on from sunrise to sundown, and persists, half-asleep but always on the verge of waking.

On his last evening in San Juan, Iwaizumi reaches over first by the flick of Oikawa’s forehead. “What's gotten into you?” he says out of nowhere, his face lit up from a Mendoza red.

“What do you mean?”

“You've been quiet the past few days,” Iwaizumi answers. “You didn't think I'd notice that?”

Oikawa smiles; it’s nice to know how thoughts can still collide.

A bottle finished between them, the two of them stay on his apartment floor, too dazed to even entertain their planned night out on the plaza. They leave the balcony window open, for the breeze, and let the rest of the world come inside. A truck rumbles through the street, while the sparrows talk with crows on telephone wire. An ombú tree’s branches rustle in the courtyard, low-hanging over roofs and residents having a steak dinner below the leaves. Downstairs, American neighbors play classical music for the trillionth time, singing along to songs without words and not caring in the slightest.

In their haze of sense and sound, Oikawa finds Iwaizumi in the slit under the coffee table, their only partition, to flick him on the forehead right back.

“Maybe this is just what happens when you get older,” Oikawa tells him, not exactly slurred but not held back, either. “You say less.”

“Aren’t people more honest, instead?”

Oikawa realizes he’s too tipsy to ponder the ways of the universe. “Then tell me, Iwa-chan,” he says instead. “Be honest with me.”

“About what?”

“I don't know,” Oikawa says. “Anything.”

“I can't give you something out of the blue like that.”

“But you used to do that all the time, didn’t you?”

“How?” Iwaizumi asks.

“You'd nag me and nag me to death, but all you were doing was telling the truth.”

Oikawa peeks over, one eye open, half-way to a wince. In Miyagi, taunting Iwaizumi in such a manner would’ve resulted in a scolding, or at least another flick of the forehead. The heat would leave as fast it’d come, and then Iwaizumi would return, cool as ever, to walk alongside Oikawa again.

In San Juan, Iwaizumi just breathes out, eyes shut to doze; in the quiet of their warmth, he grins, and lets it fade when he falls asleep, just centimeters away.

“Talk about honesty,” Oikawa says to him. “A little wine, and you're out.”

Oikawa reaches out again under the coffee table, just short of finding Iwaizumi on the other end. When he can't, he gets up to close the balcony door, safeguarding their silence.

* * *

Oikawa begins his twenty-sixth birthday with a morning run, one-hundred practice serves at practice, and a slew of congratulatory Instagram posts from his fans. They’re kind, mostly, if he doesn't count the trolls and backhanded captions about doing his best to avoid eye wrinkles, but even the nice ones, the well-wishes, leave a strange taste in his mouth: things like _you’re going to have such a great year_ read like great expectation (or, perhaps, the divinations of teenage soothsayers).

“Hey, Oikawa-san,” one of his teammates says from the train seat behind him. “I didn't even realize, but it's your birthday today, huh?”

“Yes, yes,” Oikawa says, waving him off and the WE LOVE YOU TOORU-KUN Instagram post he’s got on his phone. “It's no big deal. I’m keeping it quiet this year.”

“That’s no way to go about it! What if we went to karaoke after the game, since we have the next day off? You must know a spot in Sendai, right?”

Oikawa thinks about this for a moment. “Well, I guess I don't have birthday plans, but...” he blinks a few times, letting the grin spread across his face. “How about we win first? And then we can decide.”

The teammate in question shudders, muttering something about botched receives. “R-right!” he says to Oikawa with a salute, just as the bus stops in front of the arena.

That afternoon, Oikawa’s team loses in three sets. He still doesn't like losing — he can't think of anyone that does — but he considers this game a particularly ill omen, when six of his jump serves go out of bounds, a personal worst in his time in the V-League. “My birthday is bad luck,” he declares, an occasion too heinous for karaoke.

That evening, Oikawa sets a ball, impromptu, on a court he used to rule, a surprise presence during a weekday practice match. Backs of familiar Seijou blue shuffle in the six-man rotation. He watches them fly up, then hit the ground with stomping feet, how wildly they proclaim that this is the best they've ever felt.

“The best you've ever felt?” Oikawa asks one of the middle blockers.

“Yeah! It can't get better than this!”

Oikawa grins.

“Oh, but what about tomorrow?” Oikawa suggests.

Afterwards, they even all ask him for autographs, none of them jockstraps, and ask for advice on the matter of growth: _how much protein should I be eating on a daily basis, Oikawa-senpai?_ and _how does one grow taller and taller, like you have?_

In truth, it's a question Oikawa doesn't know how to answer, because he knows that growth will move without any set destination — that centimeters, and wingspans, and age are just pit stops on the way to a greater unknown. That words like _best_ will only limit you, if you let them.

“Lots of jump serves,” he says with a smile like a secret, because he knows what it was like to be their age, expectant of the destination. “And plenty of rest, so you'll be ready for the next day.”

After practice, Oikawa says goodbye to Sendai by the way of a train back to Tokyo. He can already imagine his mother, whining about her absent son, to her beloved monstera plant. All at once, Sendai speeds away, and the images of the city flit through his mind. Short winter sun, and long summer nights. Seijou blue, more beautiful than a clear sky. Banners, hung up on the rafters, only to fall and rise again. Convenience store fare and off-days. How two boys run together, day, night, and dusk, then go their own ways at the end of a well-worn path.

One city speeds away for another. Close to Tokyo, Oikawa calls Iwaizumi, instinctive about remembering the time differences between Argentina and Japan. Iwaizumi’s morning, to Oikawa’s night. Twelve hours, he used to keep, as if cities could exist on completely different ends of the universe altogether. He laughs, remembering where they are now: on the same island, if only for a little longer.

_But what about tomorrow?_

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa says into Iwaizumi’s voicemail. “Remember that time we laid on the floor in San Juan that last night, and how you said we should be more honest, the older we got?”

The train pulls into the station, and Oikawa finds his way back towards Shimokitazawa.

“Well, it's my birthday today,” he continues, “and I thought I should try something new.”

* * *

On Iwaizumi’s last morning in Argentina, Oikawa wakes up, begs for his mother in Sendai, and swears off wine for as long as he’s alive. He gets up from the floor, back aching, when he lets in the day by the way of an open door to the balcony: partially cloudy, but no sign of rain, the forecast said — and the perfect weather for a flight to depart.

He looks down at the courtyard, where the neighbors are usually taking seven AM breakfast. Today, it’s empty, and he wonders if they know something about the weather that he doesn’t. Perhaps the rain will come today, just the other days on this trip, and maybe Iwaizumi’s departure will end in delay, or cancellation. It’s a selfish thought, he knows, one he blames on the hangover, dancing from ear to ear and tying ribbons with his brain. He thinks back to what his teammates have said about over-drinking, and the effects on one’s mornings, after the fact: _bitter drink, bitter head._

Alone on the balcony, Oikawa doesn’t look back inside. He pretends Iwaizumi has already gone back to Tokyo, and that this morning is entirely his to waste. When the Americans begin playing classical music through their windows again, earlier than usual, he tells himself it is a sonata — whatever a sonata is — for those who’ve decided to make distance again.

“Hey,” Oikawa calls, in English, to his American neighbors. He leans over the balcony, to meet them on theirs, right below his. “It’s too early for this!”

“What do you mean?” one of them says back. “It’s almost eleven! We had a deal, remember? Classical comes on after ten.”

“Eleven?” Oikawa asks himself, before nearly falling over the railing. He runs back inside and tries to remember Iwaizumi’s itinerary for the day, and if his flight was supposed to leave at ten in the morning, or ten at night. One sock comes on without the other, then a fresh shirt, inside out. He nearly trips over himself in the hallway, on said single sock, then does on the wayward slippers, and scrambles to gather Iwaizumi’s things — like his duffel bag, an errant hoodie on the back of a chair, a comb.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa yells. “Iwa-chan, we have to —”

He stops short in the living room, when he finds that Iwaizumi is still fast asleep on the floor. It shocks him into a calm that only rests like the thin surface of something unknown.

“— go.”

The calm does not last. When he swallows it, it sits heavy in his stomach, so dense no one may ever lift it again.

 _Okaa-san,_ Oikawa even finds himself begging for again, 18,000 kilometers away, like the child he once was: do you really think you know your Hajime-kun, and that when he sleeps, he leaves his mouth agape, like he might start talking in his dreams? How a body falls and rises, blanketed in morning sun? _Do you know, okaa-san,_ of the one hand that grazes over the slightly-lifted t-shirt, the itch of bare skin, while the other rests as an open palm?

The open palm. Oikawa drops everything in the face of it, hands free so he may something to reach out with. Knees go weak until he can do nothing but kneel in the face of him. When Oikawa leans in, closer than he’s ever come to Iwaizumi, he notices how his shadow comes over a body drenched in sunbeam. Days and nights. A twelve hour time difference, come to life.

Oikawa stills. He remembers, with great clarity: the flight is tonight, and universal truths like, _bitter drink, bitter mind_. That there’s gravity, and motion, and math equations like rate multiplied by time — and there’s a reason for the distances they’ve made for themselves, even when all they’ve known, is how to intertwine.

He finds the will to stand. Smiles go practiced, until they look natural enough to fool anyone. Out on the balcony, he apologizes for snapping at the Americans, and tells them to never stop playing their sonatas. He returns Iwaizumi’s things to their places, as if he’d never rushed to pick them up at all, and sets a kettle on the stove for his very no-good mind.

“Hey, Iwa-chan,” he lilts a little louder than usual, the name an old song he can barely breathe out. “Don’t you think it’s about time you got up? It’s almost eleven!”

* * *

In the final hours of his twenty-sixth birthday, Oikawa makes three stops: the PRIMAVERA, the convenience store between their buildings, and his own one-bedroom apartment.

First, the PRIMAVERA — it was a given he’d go there immediately, because it was only three minutes away from the Shimokitazawa station, a few floors up, and really, _not so bad_ , if he had to think about it. He thinks to make amends with the apartment, since he’ll have to say goodbye to it soon, and what better way to do it, than to show up unannounced, to declare the end of his grievances? _I was thinking of you, and your too-small balcony, your leaky roof. I forgive you and all your shortcomings._

But when he gets there, the lights on the balcony are off, and no one is sipping beer on its ledge. Oikawa buzzes the door, to no answer. He calls Iwaizumi again and gets his voicemail.

“Well, here’s the first thing I want to tell you,” he says, walking towards his own apartment. “I’ve never liked your apartment. It sounds mean to say, but it’s the truth. It always smells like onions, even when you’re not cooking butadon, and roof leaks so often that I wonder if the ceiling is going to collapse on us when it rains.”

Oikawa looks back at the building once more. He exhales, at the thought of shelter.

“But I guess I do have to be thankful for it. I know you like your rent cheap, and that’s what’s kept you here, right? Even if it couldn’t get you to stay.”

He gets to the convenience store next, where he picks up the same snacks he once ate with Iwaizumi on off-days, plus a microwaveable dinner that he’ll have to heat for himself once he gets home. He presses his phone to his ear. Voicemail again.

“I also want to say that you’ve picked the worst time to move, because your attempts at butadon have actually gotten very good.” He looks, warily, at his packet of instant ramen, before setting it down to pay. “Your first one was terrible, that I’ll have to admit, but I wasn’t hungry that night anyway. Do you want to know why, Iwa-chan?”

Oikawa sighs, when he can’t let it himself say it. “Ah, where are you even?” he asks instead. “Don’t tell me you’ve moved out of the country already. I don’t think I would ever speak to you again, if you did that.”

Seven buildings down, Oikawa’s own apartment rises in its own small way, a fifth floor apartment to Iwaizumi’s third. He’s never thought of it as home, because even if some people unpack and make places for themselves, he’s always been far too busy, going to matches, and then meandering on the way home. Never one for the elevator, he climbs up, and up, steps carefully made, so he might take longer to get to the door.

Waiting in front of it, Iwaizumi sleeps, arms huddled over raised knees. He has a paper box with him, blue metallic string ruddily tied in a bow on top. Oikawa crouches down next to him, as if they were both children, waiting at each others’ houses, again.

_He’ll always find you, wherever you are._

A mother’s words echo through the years, omnipresent.

* * *

When Oikawa unlocks the door to his apartment, Iwaizumi follows in after him, feet still dragging from sleep. He nearly trips over the boxes in the hallway, still unpacked, and the errant way shoes that lay, mismatched, across the foyer.

“It’s so late, Iwa-chan.” Oikawa briefly scans the belongings on Iwaizumi, finding no phone in sight. “You should’ve called, so I’d know to clean.”

Kneeling down, Iwaizumi begins to put the shoes in order, against the wall. “Listen,” he says. “I know you said you wanted your birthday to be quiet this year, but I know that really means, _‘it would be a shame if you forgot my birthday this year.’_ And if I really _did_ forget, you’d just wallow in your own apartment for a week, up until it was time to eat butadon again.”

Oikawa takes off his shoes and lines them up with Iwaizumi’s. “Well, you’re wrong about one thing,” he says.

“What?”

“I’d wallow elsewhere, like a coffee shop with a window, or on a train, just leaving the station. You know, somewhere I can pretend, _ah, well,_ I guess I’m never seeing Iwa-chan again.”

Iwaizumi lets a small _tch_ escape from between his teeth, before stepping inside. His shoulders slump, when boxes, partially unpacked but still lived-in, pervade the entire apartment, boasting clothes, and towels, and books in towering stacks.

He looks back. “Oikawa,” he says, in a quiet that sets all joking aside. “Why?”

Oikawa shrugs. “No time.”

Setting the paper box down on the counter, Iwaizumi begins to tidy up by the smallest of measures, steps quiet so he doesn’t disturb the neighbors down below. Chopsticks, sorted into drawers. Sweaters, folded so they’ll be ready to wear by winter. Socks, paired again, despite years of mismatch. Iwaizumi does this, item by item, keepsake by keepsake. Oikawa follows until the boxes go empty, though he knows he never wants this to end.

By the time they’re finished, the sun begins to rise over a city they’ll share for only for a little while longer. On a dust-covered bedsheet, sprawled across the living room floor, Oikawa and Iwaizumi stare up at the ceiling, eyes caught on a light beginning its first dance.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa finally asks. He peers over at the unopened paper box on the breakfast bar, the only one left unpacked. “I meant to ask earlier, but what’s in there?”

Iwaizumi stares for a moment, before hoisting himself off the floor. He brings the box over, undoing the ribbon with a boxcutter before sitting next to Oikawa again.

Between his fingers, comes a medialuna: never-ending, by the ends baked together.

“Cooking’s one thing,” Iwaizumi says, “but I haven’t figured out the oven yet.”

“Oh, no.”

“What?” Iwaizumi looks away. “Do they look that bad?”

“No, it’s just — would you check your voicemails, Iwa-chan?”

Oikawa laughs until he wants to cry, and soon he finds that he actually is, palms up against his face, eyes shut between the cracks of his fingers. He lets the feeling break over him. Oikawa knows that the feeling has always been there, like someone ready to leave the home of his body, ready to step out, despite the unrest. He can tell how ready it is, by the way it laughs in lieu of a sob, or when his eyes well with tears and he knows it’s there, throwing the door open. Open _,_ it commands him, so he does: face up to the ceiling, flat on his back.

“Honesty, huh?” Iwaizumi asks, already all-knowing.

When his hands come over Oikawa’s, an attempt to pry palms away from a crying face, Oikawa is the one to come out of hiding himself.

He smiles through his tears, sun in his eyes. Open palms turn to the reach of arms around shoulders, and then a kiss, to begin their tomorrow.

* * *

On a balcony somewhere in Shinjuku, Hanamaki and Matsukawa share beers in celebration of Oikawa Tooru’s twenty-seventh birthday. When it officially hits midnight, they gulp down the rest of their open bottles, lean over the ledge, and search for planes that blink across the sky.

“It’s unfortunate that he has to spend his birthday on a flight home,” Hanamaki says, when he thinks he spots what looks like Oikawa’s plane, just over the city’s tallest buildings.

“That’s why we have these. We have to honor him,” Matsukawa insists, when he goes for another and immediately cracks it open.

“He’s not dead, you know.”

“Yeah, I know, but don’t long flights make you wish you were?”

Hanamaki loosens his tie and thinks of long business flights, seemingly endless. It suddenly strikes him that he’d rather have a bourbon than a beer. Matsukawa produces a bottle of just that from his side, an unshaven godsend, and pours Hanamaki the first glass.

“Well, I don’t agree with the _dead_ thing,” Hanamaki admits, taking the first sip. “It’s not like he’s coming back from work. Iwaizumi’s got a nice place in Cali, doesn’t he?”

“One might say he’s traveling for pleasure.”

They both snicker over the ledge and peer out again. A new light, visible in spite of cloud cover, comes up from the horizon.

“Ah, well...visiting Iwaizumi,” Matsukawa continues before trailing off a moment. “Wouldn’t coming back from a trip like that make you feel worse than death?”

Getting up from his side of the ledge, Hanamaki stretches out, drink still in hand.

“You know,” Hanamaki says with a sigh, and a look that says, _come to bed._ “I think he’ll be alright.”

Matsukawa understands immediately. He gathers the bottles, before looking up at the sky. He wishes Oikawa a safe return, before venturing back inside.

* * *

In truth, Oikawa loves his apartment more than anyone will ever know. First of all, it’s not the PRIMAVERA, and his balcony is bigger; and his shower, state-of-the-art, has better water pressure than every other shower he’s ever had the misfortune of using. He likes where he keeps the shoe rack, and the pieces he’s procured from local artists, and his plates and his pots and his pans. His microfiber duvet, his bathrobes, and his lack of houseplants. He could go on about all this, he thinks, especially when he’s just spent eleven hours on a plane — but first, _sleep_. When he gets home from California, just a quarter after one in the morning, he slips off his shoes, rolls his suitcase into his room, and finds the couch, of all things, to doze. He’ll get up in ten, he tells himself. Ten.

Ten minutes turn to hours. Night slides into day. Oikawa wakes up on the floor the following afternoon, in between the couch and the coffee table. What a fond space, he thinks, even when his back is aching and the sun is too strong in the apartment. He reaches under the table, as if Iwaizumi will be on the other side.

Oikawa stays on the floor, when he gets a call from his mother.

“Oh, Tooru,” she says, still two hours away by train in Sendai. “You got back last night, right?”

“Yes,” he answers, stretching out the knots in his neck. “But I couldn’t sleep the whole ride.”

“No leg room?”

“That part was fine, I guess,” Oikawa says, with the sigh, before smacking himself clean across the face. “You think he’d nag me less, now that we’re older. All the way to the airport, he does this, when all I want is to have a nice time.”

His mother laughs over the phone; she’s in particularly good spirits today, because she’s ordered five new houseplants, plus a sapling for her yard.

“What an honest sound that must be,” she says. “It’s almost nice to take back with you, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Oikawa admits, with a smile he doesn’t mean to show. “Maybe. I guess it’s better than a goodbye.”

* * *

Three days after Oikawa’s twenty-seventh birthday, Iwaizumi shocks all of his followers by posting, for once, with something magnificent. A blue sky rises, eternal, but doesn’t outshine; wading among the waves, far off, Oikawa grins despite his last day in California.

“Wow, Iwaizumi’s even got himself a caption,” Matsukawa says, scrolling through his phone.

“Yeah?” Hanamaki asks. “What did he write?”

“Belated _,”_ Oikawa answers, as he finds Iwa-kun by the window.

They say the haworthia is slow to grow and even rarer to flower. But he knows, all too well, of the things that bloom in due time.

* * *

When dusk approaches in San Juan, the sun screams gold into the sky and the earth below it. Through the spaces in the ombú tree’s branches, the last of the light hides, hoping that neither of them will notice until the next morning. Dinner done, the neighbors have retreated back into their rooms, while the Americans, tired of their music, have moved onto the indefinite quiet.

Oikawa stares down from the balcony, letting the wind rush through his hair. He hides his face in the rush of it, eyes stinging from the breeze.

At the base of the tree, Iwaizumi lets his hands come against the bark of a wide trunk, short but sturdy for its stature. He bows his head to it, in prayer, perhaps, or a momentary dream. Low-hanging leaves, just beginning to flower, welcome him in embrace, while strong roots spread out, far-reaching, across the courtyard.

“Iwa-chan,” Oikawa calls, as the light begins to fade for the day, and gold turns to the neon pink. “This is going to sound strange, but…” he trails off for a moment. “That tree looks like you.”

Iwaizumi stares up too, his blinks caught between the leaves. When it comes back to the balcony, his face spreads into a smile, one only for Oikawa to find.

 _Well, I guess you’ll know where to look for me now_ , it says, without the words.

* * *

_Did you know that distance is only me, growing towards you_?

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone! Thank you for reading this iwaoi - they hold a soft spot in my heart, and it was so nice to come back to them. Writing them felt oddly like coming home, and it was nice getting to write them a few years removed. While this fic is about distance, I wanted to explore the frustrations, fussing, and longing that come from it, but the growth that comes from it, too. 
> 
> Also, I don't know if you can tell, but I have a HUGE fondness for apartment aesthetics and houseplants (but I unfortunately possess no actual balconies to yearn from). I also tried my best to research things about San Juan, and breakfast foods. The moment I saw a pastry with the ends baked together, I had to include it. This is how much Iwaoi has infiltrated my brain.
> 
> Anyway, thank you so much for reading. You can find me on @sixthmoons on twitter, where I'm usually tweeting nonsense.
> 
> (P.S. This is officially an Iwa-kun stan account I will be taking no questions)


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